Читать книгу The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology - Группа авторов - Страница 18

The term “Sociology of Medicine,” as previously noted, refers to half of Straus’s (1957) original two-subfield model. The term is still appropriate for the broad subfield that takes medicine and its various activities pertaining to health and illness as an object of study. The Sociology of Medicine is characterized as research and analysis of the medical or health environment from a sociological perspective (Broom et al. 2013; Cockerham 2017; Straus 1957). The most relevant language from the Committee on Certification in Medical Sociology (1986) that pertains to the Sociology of Medicine today is that it covers “medical occupations or professions and the organization, financing, and delivery of medical care services; medicine as a social institution and its relationship to other social institutions; cultural values and societal responses with respect to health, illness, and disability.”

Initially, the Sociology of Medicine encompassed the Social Psychology of Health and Illness and those facets of Social Epidemiology pertaining to the effects of social structures on health – essentially everything except sociological work that occurred within medical and health-related institutions (i.e. Sociology in Medicine). With the emergence of these other subfields as distinctive entities in medical sociology, the Sociology of Medicine is now primarily centered on issues linked with health care delivery and health care experiences, medical knowledge, and health social movements, including social inequality, social institutions, and health policy/law.

In its original conception, the Sociology of Medicine was centered in university sociology departments and characterized as “academic” rather than “applied” because of its grounding in sociological theory. This is the subfield where theory originated with Parsons’ sick role and where theory has been closely identified in medical sociology. Although other subfields, particularly Social Epidemiology and the Social Psychology of Health and Illness, consistently test theories of health causation, Sociology of Medicine applies a broader range of sociological theories related to structure, culture, and social institutions. For example, social epidemiological research on structural health inequalities by race, class, and gender can spill over into the Sociology of Medicine when those disparities are linked to inequitable distributions of health insurance and health care within institutions of medicine (Lutfey and Freese 2005).

The Sociology of Medicine is perhaps best represented by the emergence of research on medicalization (Conrad 1992), pharmaceuticalization (Abraham 2010), biomedicalization (Clarke and Shim 2011), and health-related social movements (Brown et al. 2013). For example, Conrad’s work on medicalization has uncovered the role of the medical profession in defining previously non-medical problems in medical terms, usually as an illness or disorder requiring a medical intervention. Conrad and others subsequently found that the forces driving medicalization have shifted to include biotechnology (Clarke and Shim 2011), patients and consumers (Barker 2002; Brown et al. 2001), and mass media advertising and the profit incentives in managed care systems (Conrad and Leiter 2004). Such critical perspectives on the roles of capitalism and social control in health care is one of the Sociology of Medicine’s most important contribution to Medical Sociology.